Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response.

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Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people. - Cornel West

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Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom. - Cornel West

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Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it. - Cornel West

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Boldness be my friend. - William Shakespeare

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Where words fail, music speaks.

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You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. - Cornel West

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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all. - Cornel West

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A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth. - Cornel West

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Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board. - Cornel West

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